after effects lag

[Darby Edelen]

What codec is the video using? Some codecs (like AVC/H.264) take a while to read/decode.

Darby Edelen

[Walter Soyka]

How slow?

Ae is not real-time, so you shouldn’t expect the same performance from it that you’d get from your NLE.

If you are using the ray-tracing renderer instead of the Classic 3D renderer, it will be significantly slower. Check this with Ctrl+K to open your composition settings, then clicking the Advanced tab.

Finally, 8 GB is not as much RAM as you might think for Ae. What are your Memory & Multiprocessing settings under preferences?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Anas Sabeeh]

do you mean what format is it, it is an mp4 format video

[Anas Sabeeh]

i am using the classic 3d renderer ,the memory and multi procssing settings are:
RAM reserved for other applications: 1.5GB
RAM available for after effects: 6.5GB
i got the reduce cache size unchecked
and rednder multiple frames simultaneously unchecked
should i check them or what thanks

[Walter Soyka]

It could just be After Effects’s normal behavior.

If the video looks pixelated while you are scrolling, that’s the Adaptive Resolution feature. You can turn this off by clicking the lightning bolt icon under the viewer and selecting Off (final quality) instead.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Darby Edelen]

Format is a more general term, but yes that’s basically what I was asking.

.mp4 is either an H.264 or MPEG-4 video which may not decode well in AE. I’d recommend transcoding to a format that is more friendly like Animation (big files, maximum quality), ProRes (bigger files than MP4, smaller than animation, high quality) or PhotoJPEG (bigger files than MP4, smaller than animation, fairly high quality).

If the file you’re working with is quite large then I’d recommend transcoding just a small part of it to see whether that improves AE’s performance.

Darby Edelen

[Anas Sabeeh]

thanks, so what format do you recommend me to transcode the video to, i want it to run really smoothly

[Anas Sabeeh]

yes it looks pixelated while scroling, can you be more clear pleese where can i found the viewer and turn off the final quality

[Darby Edelen]

The codecs I mentioned in my last post are all QuickTime. You can use Adobe Media Encoder or another solution to transcode to them, in order of my preference:

1. PhotoJPEG (100% quality is practically visually lossless, 95% is still quite good and provides a lot of file size savings)

2. ProRes (practically visually lossless, quite good file size, not compatible with every system especially windows)

3. Animation (entirely lossless, files are big)

Keep in mind this should help your experience in AE but it likely won’t solve all your troubles.

Darby Edelen

[Walter Soyka]

[anas sabeeh] “yes it looks pixelated while scroling, can you be more clear pleese where can i found the viewer and turn off the final quality”

[image]

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events